“Just Another Brick in the Wall”: Standardization and the Devaluing of Education

Abstract

Standardization and curriculum alignment are the dominant curricular forces in education today. Due in part to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, education has become singularly focused on teaching towards the test in order to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), yet data has shown that using standardized testing does not result in increased student learning or development. This article discusses the current state of education in this country as well as the detrimental effects that standardization and strict curriculum alignment have, not only on students, but on educators as well.Standardization and curriculum alignment (also called curriculum narrowing) can be defined as a method of educational quality control (Wraga, 1999) where the "process of teaching and learning is predetermined, pre-paced, and pre-structured. There is little room for originality or creativity on the part of teachers or students [and] specific, correct answers are elicited to specific, direct questions" (Mahiri, 2005, p. 82). Therefore, in order to pass the required yearly "high stakes" standardized exams required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), the process of teaching is increasingly becoming "teacher proof" (Crocco & Costigan, 2007) in school districts across the country. This educational practice continues to destroy the notion of a critical, engaging, and self-reflective education in this country (Giroux, 2010). There is decreasing potential for individuality and creativity in education today since, "Increasingly, classrooms are places in which teachers and students act out the script given to them by someone else, neither teachers nor students ask the questions that matter, and learning is equated with passing a test" (Hursh, 2008, p. 3). Due to NCLB (2001), both students and teachers end up losing in this era of teaching to the test (Hampton, 2005;McNeil, 2005). Students are treated like little automatons expected to spit out information at will, as their enjoyment for learning continues to diminish (Berry, 2009). They are seen as nothing more than "empty vessels to fill with prescribed knowledge" (Sleeter, 2005, p. 21), which will be tested at a later date. This model of learning does not help students acquire knowledge and become more independent and critical human beings; it only sets them up to become the next generation of unquestioning capitalist workers (

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